Many companies own or lease towers, and have expertise in the positioning (sighting), leasing, designing and/or building of towers and other equipment that are used in providing or installing telecommunications networks. American Tower, Crown Castle, InnerWireless and America Connect, are examples of companies that own, lease, use, or construct towers or distributed antenna systems in and around towers or buildings to enable wireless communications services to be distributed by various users, including without limitation either their own company or their customers, such as AT&T Wireless, Vodaphone, Sprint, or public or private radio system operators. These companies have proprietary techniques, and their own staff which is generally quite large and includes lawyers, engineers, sales people, and accountants, to conduct some or all of the following businesses: charge rent for towers and or antenna systems, charge for tower/antenna maintenance or tower location services, provide engineering or physical plant maintenance for towers, or antennas, and other associated equipment, install equipment, provide wireless service for telecom carriers, argue zoning ordinances and request variances for tower or equipment installations, negotiate leases of rooftops or tower sites, and other related products and services pertaining to towers, antennas, and wireless infrastructure in general, in order to maintain and grow a business.
The aforementioned companies often use maps and population projections, along with topographical or geographical features, and radio frequency (RF) software simulators, in order to determine where to place towers or antennas for effective coverage of a service region, how high the tower should be, where a distributed antenna system (DAS) should be placed, what types of antennas are best suited for a particular need, and other technical, esthetic, physical, legal, or economic details regarding how towers and/or antennas will effectively support radio communications through its coverage regions and through its building database and tower database. These firms also generally use lawyers to review and assess zoning ordinances involved with the erection of towers or equipment, and to negotiate site leases or purchases.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,317,599; 6,442,507; 6,493,679; 6,499,006; 6,625,454; 6,721,769; 6,850,946; 6,876,951; 6,971,063; 6,973,622; 7,019,753; 7,035,642; 7,055,107; 7,085,697; 7,096,160; 7,096,173; 7,155,228; 7,164,883; 7,171,208; 7,243,054; and 7,246,045, as well as patents and publications of such organizations as American Tower, Spectrasite (which merged with American Tower, Crown Castle International, Galaxy Engineering, InCode (bought by Verasign), and InnerWireless deal with technical issues that must be engineered for specific applications in the telecommunications business. These solutions are not aimed at or directly useable by ordinary end-user customers or ordinary landowners, homeowners, farmers, church parishioners, public service organizations, local governments, or building tenants who are generally not at all familiar with the technical details of telecommunications engineering, radio frequency planning, zoning restrictions, lease negotiations for tower sites, neighborhood covenants, or network management and operations. Further, the prior art does not at all contemplate the future, open-spectrum world of wireless, where carriers will likely be required by law to share their end users (e.g. subscribers) with other carriers or services, in a way that is similar to the Carterphone ruling and MCI rulings in the US that required AT&T to provide open access of equipment to its telephone (landline) infrastructure, and which is now adopted globally in the landline world.
Other companies, such as power utility and television cable companies, also have a need for accessing, designing, acquiring, or leasing towers, and using towers, light poles, rooftops, and other structures such as parts cabinets, remote power supplies, storage facilities for vehicles, and the like, for supporting the provisioning of their services. These carriers also have a need of being able to access the location of towers and other equipment, such as utility boxes and cabling, for maintenance purposes, and need to be able to access the physical locations of their equipment and cabling runs, for the purpose of installing or modifying, or upgrading equipment associated with its distribution of services. These companies pay staff and consultants large amounts of money to acquire real estate or to determine possible solutions to these problems.
In the specific case of tower companies, they typically lease or sell access to their towers to carriers, often with complicated lease arrangements, and at times may also sell their towers in undesirable or less useful locations. Typically, these leases and sales require complicated contracts, deal terms, and protracted negotiations through brokers and technical consultancies. Sometimes carriers own their own tower business subsidiary, again requiring large staff and costly consultants. The public is generally not aware of these activities and has no way to participate in this business or activity, which is a disadvantage for both the carriers and the public at large.
It is well understood that Ebay has emerged as a leader for citizens to auction goods directly over the internet, and the Ebay website allows people to auction off items through the internet without having to deal with a large staff or complicated legal agreements. Meanwhile, many Web 2.0 companies, such as MySpace, Itaggit, eHarmony, and Facebook allow people with similar interests or specific needs to meet on line, and allow the exchange of information between people, often resulting in bartering or sharing of knowledge or information. Google has become one of the most trusted sources to find information on the web, because of its powerful searching capability to find postings on many topics. The public is able to access items quickly, efficiently, and at no cost to them. All of these previously mentioned websites allow people to easily and directly interact, without a lot of overhead or hassle.
Unfortunately, however, customers of internet or telephone service are generally viewed by the carrier as passive subscribers, paying a monthly bill to the telecom provider but not actively participating in the engineering or business improvement of the telecom provider's service. Today, telecommunication customers generally have no ability to readily participate in the improvement of services or the quality of their provider, or to actively play a useful role in the distribution of the telecom company's capabilities, except through the action of calling customer service to complain about their personal service experience. Today's telecom end-user customer is virtually powerless to readily participate in the improvement of delivery of service of a commercial telecommunication company's product, and is thus shut out from benefiting financially from any such improvement that that individual customer might otherwise be able to offer. While there may be special cases, where “someone knows someone at the telephone company who has a problem”, by and large, telecom companies have no way to readily scale or access the interests of individual customers who have a willingness and interest to help improve their own telecom experience, while also helping the carrier.
In short, today, there does not exist a system or method or apparatus that allows for the general public to easily alert or notify their telecommunications carrier, or any carrier, that they are interested and willing to offer their premises to allow the carrier to improve service. Further, there does not presently exist a public clearinghouse where carriers can explore readily (and without public knowledge, if so desired) available tower sites or available real estate or land available to their business needs. Not only does the public lose the ability to help the carrier, but the carriers also lose out because they are not aware of those customers who would be willing to help them with infrastructure or over-the-air monitoring needs. Instead, carriers pay high priced consultants in a close marketplace for infrastructure acquisition, thereby missing out on a virtually unlimited untapped number of viable sites for use by their businesses.
Currently, companies such as Tropos Netwtorks, and the MotoMesh and Canopy products (by Motorola), and many other companies are offering wireless telecom gear that can offer communications network connectivity, where network traffic is sent wirelessly through one or several nodes of a network over a geographic area such as a city. An example of this was explained at the 2006 Texas Wireless Summit conference by a Tropos Networks executive, October 2006, in Austin Tex. Many cellular, WIMAX, and Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) today are deploying cellular or hub and spoke networks using line of sight radios at 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5 GHz in various unlicensed (and sometimes licensed) bands for backhaul, and cable television over wireless and T1/T3 wireless replacements are sure to emerge as a vital marketplace. WiMax and 4th Generation cellular, with increasing bandwidths, will require more tower/site locations per square km, in line with the Power vs. Bandwidth tradeoff, that requires that more towers per square kilometer be used when the operating bandwidth increases for a given transmit power. See Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice, c. 2002, Prentice Hall, written by the inventor. Many cellular carriers, public/private network carriers, municipalities, WISPs, etc. today struggle with finding suitable towers or rooftop locations, or struggle gaining access to water tower locations, and are often hindered by zoning ordinances, lack of public understanding, or knowledge of why and how they could easily place their equipment to serve customers. Even though many rural residents would love to have wireless service, it is difficult for many WISPs to deploy broadband networks with limited capital, and the difficulty with dealing with town ordinances, neighborhood covenants, and other restrictions, regulations, or bureaucracy involved for gaining permission to use or erect towers and other infrastructure deployments.
As an example, in today's implementation of Mesh or WiFi Networks, the deployments of such systems usually rely on a particular municipality (muni-wifi customer) to have its own tower infrastructure (for example, city lamp poles, or water towers or police towers near city hall, etc.) in order to build the system. Keeping track of this infrastructure currently is difficult, often requiring consultants or different software, operating in a stove-pipe fashion, across different municipalities, where there is little or no public way to view or add to the knowledge base of the infrastructure.
An important emerging trend is that as carrier frequencies go higher, and as digital signal processing and modulation techniques such as MIMO and OFDM improve, the physical size of antennas will decrease, or at least become distributed in space, meaning that the future tower structures and physical size of antennas needed for telecom's wireless communications links will shrink. Cooperative networking, mesh networking, and peer-to-peer communications will also likely evolve, making the base station infrastructure less different then the end user equipment, and less bulky than today's infrastructure. Thus, towers of the future will not need to be today's large, bulky and ugly cellular or line-of-sight microwave variety, but will be much more lightweight, less obtrusive (e.g. skinnier), and more convenient, less expensive, and readily available for use on rooftops, billboard, church towers, or home TV or ham towers, and requiring many more tower locations per square kilometer than today.
Wireless equipment is being installed throughout the world to bring telephone and internet services in locations where broadband previously did not exist. This is trend is certain to remain in other countries throughout the world, and most particularly in countries such as China, India, and other emerging nations that have a strong need to be connected on the world's telecom grid, e.g. the world wide web or telephone network. Because of the necessity of towers or antennas, and associated network equipment, to be situated at particularly good radio locations that are specific to each telecom company and their customer's specific locations, and given each carrier's need is specific to their own network's specific design criteria and history of evolution, and because of the radio propagation aspects and geographical impact associated with wireless transmissions, it has been heretofore impossible for telecom companies to engage in direct communication with a large customer base, in order to energize and engage its customer base to help its product and service delivery.
Today, the inventor envisions very early signs of what will eventually be the “democratization” of the telecommunications infrastructure industry, where all users may participate in helping carriers locate infrastructure, and where open-access spectrum will require that all subscribers of any particular carrier be allowed too use the spectrum and services of competing carriers. Today, end user customers are willing to subscribe to satellite TV services, such as Echostar or Direct TV, and as part of that service, home owners allow the satellite carrier to bolt antennas and cables onto their homes or on masts in their yards. These satellite services require that a technician come directly to the end user's home, and in a matter of just a few hours, the technician installs a satellite dish and receiver on the roof, yard, or telephone pole or tree of the end-user's property, often having to drill holes through the exterior of the home, or through a wiring cabinet to bring the cable into the end users home, all the while hammering/bolting hardware to the exterior or roof of the home. Customers are willing to allow equipment to be installed at their premises, as shown by the satellite TV industry, and its very rapid growth in just a few years. While satellite dish antennas serve the individual homeowner, the satellite system is a receive-only system and the equipment installed at the homeowner does not allow the satellite provider to improve the delivery of its content to neighboring houses or neighborhoods. Furthermore, there does not exist a public clearinghouse that lets others know which homes have satellite dish equipment in their yards, and which do not. But this example is an early indicator, illustrating how citizens are now willing to have alien telecom equipment installed on their own premises, and to allow a technician to climb around on the roof, yard, and drill holes in the house, if it provides some benefit to them (e.g. gives them the ability to watch satellite TV). Note that satellite antennas being installed today by Echostar and DirecTV are relatively small and unobtrusive, which is a harbinger of future wireless technologies.
Today, customers do not have a methodical, computerized way of receiving perks or bartered value in addition to improved service from carriers, in exchange for giving carriers the right to install and operate the carrier's special equipment on its own property. However, if the carrier was able to communicate and take inventory of each end user's capabilities, the carrier could derive great value in its business and technical operations beyond just servicing the end user, in exchange for the end user's willingness to allow the carrier access to its dwelling and property for the carrier's overall benefit. End users, if allowed to provide access to carriers, could enjoy the goodwill of the surrounding neighbors, as they would be acting as a provider and enabler of services that would benefit households around them.
Today, thousands of small, medium, and large telecom companies, such as wireless cable companies, wireless Internet service providers (WISPs), and mainstream wireless carriers throughout the world such as those companies mentioned above are deploying wireless broadband networks, using an inventory of towers and or building structures where they have access, to deliver last-mile services, but with no ability to enlist or solicit the interests of ordinary citizens or even hobbyists who, if they were aware of the opportunity, might be willing to offer assistance to carriers. Today, the telecommunications industry is unable to solicit the help directly from its customer base, or from the citizenry at large, because of the previously mentioned technical difficulties and trust issues involved with tower and equipment site selection, and the sheer lack of ability to communicate the needs and wants and capabilities of the service provider, and the needs and wants and capabilities of the end customer, in an easy, clear, and orderly manner. There has not been, to date, a trusted source that carriers can rely upon to broker communications directly between end users and the carrier, itself. That is, there has not been, to date, such a “convener” for the telecommunications industry that would allow carriers to tap the interest of its end user customers to aid it in the rapid expansion, or improvement of quality and capabilities of telecommunication services, particular broadband, multimedia, WiFi, WiMax, cellular, satellite, public/private network, RFID or sensor based mass-communication networks, and at lower design, operating, and ongoing cost levels. Furthermore, as shown herein, there are enormous benefits for the provisioning of network services and content, on a localized or specific end-user basis, through the establishment of a trusted clearinghouse.